


Missing Me One Place Search Another

by raedbard



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Community: tww_minis, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-04-20
Updated: 2009-04-20
Packaged: 2017-10-05 10:21:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/40641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>"He's done nothing but lie to me, practically all my life. One lie, but gee it's a big one."</em></p><p>Sam finds ways to get lost, and then found again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Missing Me One Place Search Another

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the aftermath of 'Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail'.
> 
> Both Sam and Toby are quoting Walt Whitman's 'Song of Myself'.

You have a memory of looking out from a hotel bedroom window and seeing the street below fill up with rain. You wondered, then, whether there was some kind of pattern to be found in the drops -- some kind of larger order that is invisible to little kids but not so to older, cleverer heads. One of those equations that sometimes look like poetry to you, written in the Greek or algebraic notation. And although your father is a lawyer and not a mathematician you somehow have no trouble believing that he knows these secrets and one day he will share them, when you are old enough. An initiation in the rites of sense and order and the imperceptible broadening of your shoulders to accept the weight of the knowledge and the responsibility of that trust and the noble bearing of the pain that creeps up slowly: the appended surety of the widening of the pattern, the additions of the shapes made by senseless things; injustices and cruelties and lies told in faith; things you can never understand or stop feeling sad for. As a boy you were sure that your father shared these feelings; right now you're not so sure.

"You know, for a Catholic you have very odd manifestations of faith," Toby says, when you tell him this story.

"I"m not Catholic, Toby. I think I've told you this four or five times now."

"Yes, I remember."

"So why do you keep on pointing out the flaws in my non-existent faith?"

"I like to irritate you," Toby says.

"Yes."

"Call it payback."

You snort softly. "I'm comforted by the knowledge that you only ever spend this much time annoying people that you like. Which is a strange manifestation too, while we're on the subject, Toby."

"Yes."

"Which part are you agreeing to?"

"It was a general motion of agreement."

"Did you ever want to be one of those obscure university professors when you were young? You know, the ones who talk in elliptical solipsistic phrases and do really good impressions of people who have a damn clue what they're talking about?"

"Yeah. Since that's what every kid wants to be when he grows up. My mother would have been so proud."

"I wanted to be a fireman."

"And we'll run away with that imagery another time," Toby says.

"He's done nothing but lie to me, practically all my life. One lie, but gee it's a big one," you say. "All those lectures on being upright and accountable." You look up at your boss, smile wanly, stroke the patches of slicked-down hair at his temples. "I didn't get this way all on my own you know."

"I was starting to wonder."

He is lying on his side and you are trying to hope into existence after the fact an eidetic record of the distribution of hair on his chest, the softness of that hair, the almost shocking paleness of his skin under the undershirt, how the curve of his stomach seems to wake up something black and insatiable in you, that you want to feel his weight on top of you: a broad, restless body making gales of motion against your own, so much sensation that you go numb in self-defence and all that you remember is vague impressions of breadth and heat and suffocation.

You badly want him to fuck you out of consciousness. You don't want to wonder about why he might agree to oblige you.

"Do you do this with C.J.?"

You ask him without really considering it: thinking isn't bringing you much joy right now, but this is -- lying here with him, naked and pink and tractable; giving yourself a vacation from consequences.

"Do you do this with Josh?"

"No."

"Me either. Or with C.J. Or anyone else right now."

You laugh a little bit, and even to yourself the sound is sad, like the peal of a cracked bell.

"The leftover parts," you say to yourself. "'What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?'"

"Whitman?"

"Whitman for the sad parts."

"The sad parts," he repeats, his fingers making circles of dwindling circumference on the meat of your belly. He bends his head and kisses the plain, unremarkable skin. You look down at the place, expecting to see scratches from his beard; there is nothing there.

"Maybe you're a better man than he is," he says. "And that's why it hurts."

"So if I was a meaner guy I could just go over there and kick his ass and be done with it?"

"Maybe."

"And instead I'm writing him letters."

"Yeah."

"I really wanted to send that first one."

"'Dear jackass'?"

You smile. Toby returns it, gently. His hand is stroking the escarpment of your hipbone, taking infrequent excursions into the dark tangles of hair nearby.

"Yeah."

"He did a job on you."

"Good enough to pass for Catholic even," you say.

"Indeed."

"Do you ever see your dad?"

His voice darkens as he says, "No," shortly. His hand wraps around your dick without much gentleness, and the violence makes a dark, red swell in you, and you open your legs a little, and flinch from the sound of his clearing his throat.

"What happened?"

"He shot a bunch of people. He didn't bother lying about it. And you'd probably think he was a sweet old guy now."

"He isn't?"

"He's an idiot."

You readjust yourself in the bed, shrug further down against the pillows and the sheets. You raise your arm and slip it around his ribs. You stroke his back, his shoulder blades; feel them move as a he jerks you off -- the movement of subterranean things. It makes you shiver, even as you are coming.

"How d'you want to do this?" Toby asks, when the sweat has gone from your forehead. He says it as if it is one of the most excruciating sentences he has ever spoken.

You smile at him: one of those blank, selfish smiles that he doesn't get to see; that you would never have allowed him to see before.

"Just fuck me."

He lays on hand on your left shoulder, pushes you into the bed hard enough to make the upward swing of your head on the bounce feel like whiplash. You brush your hair out of your eyes and let yourself start to feel angry. Toby kneels at the end of the bed, his hand casually stroking up and down his cock, staring into your eyes, daring you, or interrogating you, or trying to drain out of his own face everything that might give you a clue about what he is thinking right now. You stare back at him. You open you legs again, breathing deeply but not heavily, aware that this makes you look seventeen and sullen, like everything in the world is against you. You think that is what you want him to see: a sulky kid who he finds beautiful enough to fuck some sense into. If Toby was the kind of guy who had thoughts like that.

His hands are warm on your thighs as he grabs hold, opens your legs around his waist, pulls up and out so that your feet are hovering in the air by his shoulders. He coats his thumb in lube and presses it into you like he's testing the texture of a new mattress or the freshness of a loaf of bread. He pulls down with his thumb because he is trying to widen the span of the muscle, and that hurts, but you want that, and try to moan encouragingly. His index finger goes into you almost diffidently, as though he preferred the sensation on his less sensate thumb, but he adds another after a minute, and then another. You push back against him, hard and fast, and glory in the press of his knuckles underneath your balls.

He is dark and _Toby_ when he takes his hand away and squirts some lube into his palm and wraps his hand around his cock, stroking, like someone who is sleepy and distracted, even though his erection is hard, and dark, and bigger than you were expecting. Neither of you say the word 'condom' and it doesn't seem to stupid to neglect it right at that moment as it will in a few hours' time.

He presses down on you -- the back of his forearm against the back of your knees, making the muscles scream and everything south of your waist feel taut and exposed and indefinably wanted. He sighs a little when he enters you, like it wasn't quite what he was expecting. He lets your legs go, allows them to curl around his ribcage; you need the leverage. You are in pain, you are stretched, you are frustrated by the imperfection of this act and in love with the hope that one day it might be perfect. You are fascinated for a moment with the spread of sweat on his brow. You find him frightening, and beautiful: a tornado, a tsunami, the fall of a great old building on the skyline, barrelling into you with the force of a thousand bricks come unstuck from their homes. You are also in love with that brutality and how it stands against the look in his eyes that is nothing more or less than what is there: Toby, taking it seriously, taking notes, applying himself, making it stick, asking for the best and the finest, and just looking at the day and appraising it.

This is the day he fucked Sam Seaborn. You wonder what grade he gave it.

Toby comes with a grunt and a small cry that you don't think he meant to let go. You feel a little closer to completely numb than you did half an hour ago, but there is still an ache; the one that won't be going away. You wonder if perhaps all you done is give it a bit of company today.

Toby wipes the sweat off his forehead, then swipes his hand over the sweat creeping down his chest. You want to ask him to stay still, exactly as he is, kneeling with his legs wide on the bed and his erection subsiding slowly, and cram his cock into your mouth until it fills your throat.

"Sam?"

"Huh?"

"You wanna sleep a bit? Since you seem to be having some kind of bet with yourself about how many articles of my furniture you can sleep on."

You smile, the first genuine smile of the week, you think, though you haven't particularly been keeping count.

"Yeah, that'd be good."

"I'll be next door," he says. His voice is soft: with embarrassment, with a promise, with an admission of something you never needed a promise of. He gathers up his clothes, or enough of them to make do with, and as he goes to the door he stops by your side and runs his hand through your hair.

"You look like a scarecrow," he says, smiling in his eyes.

"You look like a guy who just got laid. Better not go back to the office for a while. People will talk."

Toby laughs. "Just sleep, okay?"

"Yeah."

"Call your dad in the morning," he says, like a suggestion, not the order you were expecting.

"Yeah."

"Try not to think so much. Your brain can't take the heat."

"Get out of here, Toby."

He smiles, for a split second. He leans in to kiss you -- his lips soft and circumspect, so awkward now, afterwards. He looks as though he doesn't know what he's doing there. You can still feel every inch of him, every branding inch, every slick touch, every atom of weight, every evidence of care. And the chaos-noise he makes in you, buzzing like a bee box, makes you very tired.

You think he whispers, as you put your head down on his pillow, "'I stop somewhere, waiting for you.'"


End file.
